Google unveils ChatGPT rival Genesis, AI enterprise tools

Google unveiled a swath of fresh AI technology and partnerships on Tuesday, including a new flagship AI model named "Gemini," custom-built AI chips, and an invisible watermark to identify AI artwork, among other large business-driven AI tools for Workspace.

Tuesday's announcement was made at the Google Next conference in San Francisco – the move seemingly meant to rival OpanAI’s ChatGPT-4 Enterprise platform announced Monday.

The flurry of announcements is part of Google's recent effort to showcase its AI plans after Microsoft caught the company off guard with an ambitious AI strategy it has been rolling out since last year.

Gearing its new releases to bring big business and artificial intelligence under one platform, Google’s Genesis is set to be a direct competitor to GPT-4 and boasts computing power five times that of GPT-4, according to the company.

The GPT nemesis large language model is trained on Google's TPUv5 chips, and capable of simultaneous operations with a massive 16,384 chips.

The Alphabet-owned firm plans to release the Gemini model to the public in December 2023.

Over 100 AI models

Google announced new versions of its own foundation AI infrastructure that improve performance and add features.

Google's new tools include "Duet AI in Workspace", which will assist customers across its apps with writing in Docs, drafting emails in Gmail, and generating custom visuals in Slides, among others.

"We have released this add-on in response to strong customer demand and will continue to enhance and expand," Google said, adding that the tools were tested by more than a million users.

The new version of its text model called PaLM, for example, increased the amount of text users can input to make it easier to process longer documents such as legal briefs and books.

Google also discussed a tool that adds the capability to watermark AI-generated images, called SynthID.

SynthID has the technology to alter a digital image file in a way invisible to human eyes, but is designed to remain intact after an image is altered or tampered with.

Google also rolled out AI updates to its suite of office software and security tools. The company unveiled an AI-powered tool that can port databases from Oracle to an open-source version, a notoriously difficult task.

To bolster Google's enterprise cloud service it added 20 AI models to its collection, bringing the total to 100.

The AI infrastructure includes deals to bring Google Cloud customers access to Meta Platforms' AI model LLaMa 2, and to the startup Anthropic's Claude 2.

Google said its making its new artificial intelligence-powered tools available to enterprise customers at a monthly price of $30 per use.

Custom AI chips

Ahead of the announcement of its full-fledged fifth-generation tensor processing unit (TPU), Google has opened access to a version that is optimized for genAI and large language models.

The new chip, called TPU v5e, is designed to train large models but also efficiently serve content from those models. It is not as powerful as the as-yet un-launched flagship fifth AI generation chip.

Google has stitched together the TPU v5e chips into batches of 256 that it describes as a "supercomputer."

Cloud customers can connect several pods together in order to tackle more complex computing problems.

The batch of announcements included new customers for its cloud software such as General Motors and Estee Lauder Companies.

OpenAI had touted Estee Lauder in Monday’s Enterprise AI platform announcement as one of the several Fortune 500 companies that have incorporated the latest ChatGPT-4 model into business services since the AI generation was released in March.

The company plans to release more offerings over the coming months for other customer segments, including small and medium-sized businesses and consumers.

Google also announced a multi-year agreement with the government of El Salvador, establishing an office in the Central American country to deliver its Google Distributed Cloud services.

The seven-year strategic partnership, pending legislative approval, will focus on the areas of digital government, healthcare, and education., the company said Tuesday.